The present invention relates generally to identity authentication technology, and more specifically, to visual liveness detection for a speaker in speaker verification.
With widespread use of mobile Internet applications, such as mobile banking applications, mobile purchase applications, and mobile payment applications, mobile security becomes more and more important.
Generally an important technology for the mobile security is identity authentication technology, which verifies an identity of a person. Currently the identity authentication technology based on biological characteristics becomes more popular, for example, facial recognition, fingerprint identification, and iris recognition.
Facial recognition is a technology which utilizes facial features to authenticate a person. Firstly an image or video containing a face of a person is captured by a camera. The face in the image or video is detected or tracked. Then the facial features of the face are extracted and matched to recognize the face, and thus the identity of the person can be verified. However the facial recognition utilizes the face image which is static, so it would happen that a person uses another person's facial photo or a video about another person to impersonate another person for identity authentication.
Therefore visual liveness detection for a person is proposed to prevent impersonation in the identity authentication. A conventional approach for liveness detection is eye-blinking detection, which can determine the liveness of a person by detecting the eye-blinking action. However the eye-blinking detection cannot differentiate the real-time eye-blinking action from the eye-blinking action from a recorded video.
Another conventional approach for liveness detection is facial expression detection, which can determine the liveness of a person by asking the person to show a specified expression and detecting whether the specified expression is correctly shown. However the facial expression detection is not user-friendly and the number of expressions is limited.